What is your ethic of the Chesapeake Bay?

I was born and raised in Maryland, on the Western shore, eating crabs soaking in Old Bay and catching catfish and rockfish. The Chesapeake Bay has been essential in helping me figure out who I am and what I want to do with my life. Without the Bay I don’t know who I would be and I don’t want anyone to miss out on that opportunity. Without the Bay I wouldn’t have chosen a school in Maryland studying Biology and Environmental Science, putting all of my effort into understanding and protecting the Bay. I want my children and grandchildren to be able to appreciate and experience the Bay the way that I did.

The Chesapeake Bay deserves to be cherished and cared for so that everyone can have the experiences and opportunities that I did. The Chesapeake Bay’s wildlife should be protected and its fisheries should be regulated. If we do nothing then the Bay will not be anything like it is today, species will start to disappear and it will never be the same. The Bay is a living thing, it will always be changing, but not as drastically as it is now.

Humans have devastated the Bay and we need to help repair it by starting at the infrastructure level, as we discussed in Dr. Seidel’s lecture. The environment is effected by the human sociocultural system, the lowest level of which is the infrastructure level that contains production and reproduction. In order to help the Bay we need to manipulate the production part of the infrastructure. We need to change how we get and produce our food; the amount of chemicals we are using on crops and regulations we have on the organisms in the Bay. If things do not change in the infrastructure level of the system then nothing will change in the Bay. It starts at the infrastructure level and slowly works up. It goes to the structure and superstructure; the chemicals we put in the Bay and the ways in which we get our food from the Bay changes the way we cook our food and the people in the Chesapeake Bay region live and what they depend on and even what the people in the region believe in.

We cannot ignore the problems in the Bay, it is our responsibility to “fix” the Bay and keep it as healthy as we possibly can in order to conserve the beauty and the parts of the Bay that we have grown to love and care about. If we do not stop using so many chemicals on farm fields and if we don’t stop overfishing and depleting our resources then the Bay will not be here the way that it should be for future generations. We have to start thinking about the consequences for our actions before it is too late. If the Bay is destroyed and not preserved it will be our fault.